Four verbs, all wayyiqtol, all with Gentiles as subject: they believed, they proclaimed, they clothed themselves, and the verse closes with a merism that sweeps in the whole population. Nothing in the verse reports a word from Jonah beyond the five words of v. 4, and nothing reports repentance yet — that comes in v. 8 (שׁוב) and is seen by God in v. 10. Verse 5 reports belief and its public, bodily expression.

Three things carry the weight. First, אמן in the hiphil with בְּ is the vocabulary of Abraham’s trust in Gen 15:6 and Israel’s at the sea in Exod 14:31 — the Ninevites are given the verb Israel is given at its best moments. Second, the object of their trust is ʾĕlōhîm, not YHWH; the narrator keeps the Gentile horizon intact and does not upgrade their theology. Third, the leitwort קרא, which YHWH used of Jonah’s commission (1:2; 3:2) and which Jonah has just discharged (3:4), now has the Ninevites as its subject: the proclamation has become their proclamation.

The closing merism מִגְּדוֹלָם וְעַד־קְטַנָּם uses גָּדוֹל, the book’s leitwort for Nineveh’s greatness (1:2; 3:2, 3), and now applies it not to the city but to its ranking citizens — and pairs it with its opposite.

Proposed — pending reviewJack M. Sasson, Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Interpretation, Anchor Bible 24B, New York: Doubleday, 1990

וַֽיַּאֲמִינוּ is hiphil of אָמַן, construed with בְּ. The lexicons agree on the construction’s force: to put confidence in, to entrust oneself to, as distinct from believing a statement to be factually true (which Hebrew more often expresses with the hiphil plus לְ, “give credence to”). HALOT and BDB both separate the two constructions, though the line between them is not airtight in practice.

The English problem is that “believe in God” has acquired a creedal sense that the Hebrew idiom does not carry on its own. The Hebrew says the Ninevites reckoned God reliable and acted accordingly — the next two verbs are the evidence. The literal line keeps “believed in God” because the preposition is there and must be visible; the modern line gives “put their trust in God,” which is what the construction means.

The narrator says nothing about the content of their belief. They have heard forty days and an overthrow. What they trust is that the threat is real and that the one behind it may be dealt with.

The object is אֱלֹהִים, anarthrous, and not YHWH. This is deliberate and consistent with the book’s practice: Gentile speech and Gentile religious action take אֱלֹהִים (1:5, 6; 3:5, 8, 9), while the narrator’s own frame and Israelite speech take YHWH. The Ninevites have been told nothing of the covenant name; Jonah’s five-word oracle (3:4) names no deity at all.

Per the binding glossary, אֱלֹהִים is never rendered YHWH. Rendering it “God” rather than “a god” follows the fact that the narrator treats their trust as genuinely directed at the God who sent Jonah — v. 10 has הָאֱלֹהִים seeing their deeds and relenting. But the irony is left where the Hebrew leaves it: pagans trust a God whose name they do not know, while the prophet who knows the name has fled from it.

וַיִּקְרְאוּ־צוֹם is the idiom for publicly declaring a fast (cf. the same collocation in the Judahite assemblies of 2 Chr 20:3 and Ezra 8:21, and the royal fast of Jer 36:9). The joining maqaf binds verb and noun tightly.

What matters here is lexical, not idiomatic. קָרָא is the book’s commission verb: YHWH tells Jonah to קרא against the city (1:2; 3:2), Jonah does so (3:4), and now the city’s men קרא in response. The glossary binds this root to the call/proclaim family throughout, so the English must show the same verb. “Declared a fast” or “ordered a fast” would be natural English and would snap the chain; “proclaimed a fast” keeps it.

צוֹם (fast) is a general-purpose act of self-abasement before God in distress, not specifically penitential in itself — it accompanies mourning (2 Sam 12:16), petition (2 Sam 12:21–23) and national crisis. It is not yet the turning from violence that v. 8 will demand.

Proposed — pending reviewDouglas Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, Word Biblical Commentary 31, Waco: Word, 1987

שַׂקִּים is plural: coarse goat- or camel-hair cloth, the material and by extension the garment made of it. The plural here is distributive — one garment each across a whole population — and English “sackcloth” is already a mass noun, so the plural cannot be shown without awkwardness. The loss is recorded rather than compensated.

לָבַשׁ in the qal takes the garment as a direct accusative with no preposition, so the literal line supplies “[in]” in brackets. Sackcloth with fasting is the standard Israelite gesture of mourning and supplication (Gen 37:34; 1 Kgs 21:27; Joel 1:13); the narrator describes the Ninevites performing it without comment, and without telling us how they knew to.

מִגְּדוֹלָם וְעַד־קְטַנָּם is a merism: naming the two poles to mean the whole. Both adjectives are masculine singular in the construct with a 3mp suffix — literally “from their great one and as far as their small one.” The singular with plural suffix is distributive: each member of the group, taken at either end of the scale. The scale is most naturally social rank, though age is lexically possible; the king’s appearance in v. 6 and the phrase וּגְדֹלָיו (“and his great ones,” v. 7) argue for rank.

The literal line keeps the singulars visible. The modern line gives “from the greatest of them to the least of them,” which is the force.

The root גָּדוֹל is the leitwort of Jonah, bound by the glossary to “great” at every occurrence. Here its English form has to flex to a superlative in the modern line, which is noted; but the word is the same one that made Nineveh the great city (1:2; 3:2, 3) and that will name the king’s nobles in v. 7.

אַנְשֵׁי נִינְוֵה — “the men of Nineveh,” masculine plural construct of אִישׁ. Per the glossary, Jonah’s narrator uses הָאֲנָשִׁים for the ship’s crew from 1:10 onward; the same noun now names Nineveh’s population.

The referent is almost certainly the whole populace rather than adult males only: the merism that closes the verse is comprehensive, and v. 7 extends the decree to animals. Hebrew uses the masculine plural for a mixed group by default (§3), and that is what is happening here. The rendering keeps “the men of Nineveh” because that is the grammar; the inclusive referent is stated here rather than silently smoothed into “the people.”

Note what the verse does not say: it does not say the king believed. He hears of it in v. 6 and acts afterward. The movement in this chapter runs from the populace upward, which is unusual for an ancient royal city and is one of the narrative’s quiet surprises.

Proposed — pending reviewHans Walter Wolff, Obadiah and Jonah: A Commentary, trans. Margaret Kohl, Continental Commentaries, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986

LXX reads καὶ ἐνεπίστευσαν οἱ ἄνδρες Νινευη τῷ θεῷ καὶ ἐκήρυξαν νηστείαν καὶ ἐνεδύσαντο σάκκους ἀπὸ μεγάλου αὐτῶν ἕως μικροῦ αὐτῶν — a close, clause-for-clause rendering of the Hebrew, with no evidence of a different Hebrew text.

Two small shifts are worth naming. The compound ἐνεπίστευσαν with the dative τῷ θεῷ carries the Hebrew’s sense of entrusting well, but the dative flattens the בְּ construction, so the Greek cannot show the distinction between “trust in” and “give credence to.” And ἐκήρυξαν (“heralded, proclaimed”) is a good equivalent for קרא here, but it is not the verb the LXX used at 1:2 or 3:2 (ἀναβόησον / κήρυξον varies across the book), so the Hebrew leitwort chain is partly obscured in Greek. The closing merism is rendered word-for-word, preserving even the singular adjectives with plural pronouns — a Hebraism in Greek.

Draft — witness readings here are an AI’s recollection and have not been checked against the apparatus (BHQ, the Göttingen Septuagint, DJD). Verify before relying on them.

אָמַן hiphil + בְּ of God. The construction is rare and weighted. Gen 15:6 (Abram believed in YHWH) and Exod 14:31 (Israel believed in YHWH and in Moses his servant) are the two most prominent; by contrast Num 14:11 and Ps 78:22 indict Israel for not believing in God. The Ninevites receive the positive construction. Whether the narrator intends the Abraham and Exodus texts specifically, or simply uses the standard idiom, cannot be settled from the wording alone; the vocabulary is shared, the context is not.

Fasting and sackcloth as crisis response. Joel 1:13–14 and 2:12–17 give the fullest Israelite form, and Joel 2:13–14 shares Jonah’s language of relenting; the relation between Jonah and Joel runs through Jonah 3:9 and 4:2 more than through this verse.

A Gentile city’s ruler and populace humbling themselves. 1 Kgs 21:27 (Ahab in sackcloth) and Jer 36:9 (a proclaimed fast in Judah that does not produce repentance) stand as Israelite foils.

New Testament. Jesus appeals to Nineveh’s response as a judgment on his own hearers: the men of Nineveh repented at Jonah’s proclamation, and something greater than Jonah is present (Matt 12:41; Luke 11:32). The Greek there is μετενόησαν, “repented,” which answers to Jonah 3:8–10 (שׁוב) rather than to the believing of v. 5; the verse belongs to the scene the saying summarizes.

Early Church. Nineveh’s fast became a standard patristic example of fasting joined to faith rather than standing alone, and Jerome’s commentary on Jonah treats the Gentile city’s belief as a rebuke to Israel’s unbelief — a reading driven by Matt 12:41 and by the Fathers’ wider typology, not by anything the Hebrew says. The Syriac tradition’s “Fast of the Ninevites,” a three-day fast observed in the Syriac and Coptic churches, takes its name from this chapter; the details of its origin are debated and I do not give a date for it here.

Jewish tradition. Nineveh’s repentance is cited in rabbinic discussion of the Yom Kippur liturgy as a model of repentance accepted by God; the Mishnah’s treatment of fast days (Taʿanit) discusses sackcloth and ashes in connection with public fasts, though the specific locators for Jonah’s use in the Neʿilah liturgy should be checked before citing. The haftarah reading of the whole book of Jonah on the afternoon of Yom Kippur is firmly established practice, and this chapter is its center of gravity.

All of this is reception. The Hebrew of v. 5 reports belief, a proclaimed fast, and sackcloth, and leaves the theological accounting to vv. 9–10.

Proposed — pending reviewJerome, Commentary on Jonah, in Commentaires de Jérôme sur le prophète Jonas, ed. Yves-Marie Duval, Sources chrétiennes 323, Paris: Cerf, 1985

Draft — the later uses cited here (New Testament, rabbinic, patristic) are an AI’s recollection and have not been checked against the sources. Verify before relying on them.

The modern line gives “put their trust in God” for הֶאֱמִינוּ בְּ, since English “believed in God” now reads as creedal assent and the Hebrew construction is about reliance. The literal line retains “believed in God” so the preposition stays visible.

גָּדוֹל appears in the modern line as a superlative (“the greatest of them”) rather than as the glossary’s flat “great.” This is a licensed deviation: the merism construction forces it in English, and the literal line preserves “from their great one.”

The plural שַׂקִּים cannot be shown in English; “sackcloth” is a mass noun and “sackcloths” is not English. The distributive sense is carried by the merism that follows.